Where Tigers Are at Home

by Jean-Marie Blas de Robles

  On the morning of Thursday, December 23, Christina secretly left the city to go to the villa of Pope Julius, from which she was to set out in the early afternoon to make her solemn entry. Alas, a north wind had started to blow, gathering heavy clouds full of rain over the Campagna Romana. Seeing this from his window in the College, Kircher was on tenterhooks, so concerned was he that the ceremony should proceed correctly & praying that no ill fortune should deprive him of the fruits of his efforts. Immediately after lunch, which Christina took with the Pope’s emissaries, the storm burst with unheard-of violence. Flashes of lightning & peals of thunder followed at ever-decreasing intervals, as if to show disapproval of the pomp put on for a mere mortal.

  In the courtyard of the villa, over which canvas sheets were hastily hung, Monsignore Girolamo Farnese, the Supreme Pontiff’s majordomo, showed Christina the presents His Holiness was giving her: a six-horse carriage designed by Bernini, which was adorned with admirable unicorns covered in gold leaf; a palanquin and a sedan chair, both of delicate workmanship; and an immaculate Anglo-Arab steed whose gold & vermilion harness made it worthy of an emperor. Since the rain did not stop, the majordomo proposed that Christina should cancel the ‘Ceremonial Cavalcade’ & enter Rome in a carriage, but the former sovereign, with all the confidence of her twenty-eight years, refused point-blank. Thus it was that the long procession set off on the Flaminian Way in the driving rain.

  There was nothing so beautiful as her route through the town. In every street swathes of silk were flapping at the windows, the drums beat a steady rhythm & from all sides a multitude of glittering carriages came to join the solemn procession. Inside these vehicles the noblest ladies of the city displayed unashamedly costly dresses and jewels. As for their husbands, no less decked out, they rode along beside them in a deafening tumult of hooves and neighing.

  When they reached Saint Peter’s Square, the rain redoubled its assault, but Christina, who only had eyes for the cathedral, seemed unaffected by it. And the whole procession followed her example; the wind blew away hats, the downpour spoiled the precious fabrics without anyone appearing to regret or even notice it.

  On leaving Saint Peter’s she went, still under escort, to the Palazzo Farnese, which the Duke of Parma had put at her disposal for the whole of her stay in Rome. As was the custom to honor the great ones of this world, the entire front was concealed behind a fake façade. Designed by Kircher, it was impressive both for its splendor and for its unusual purpose. For the architecture he had taken his inspiration from the Temple of Music imagined by Robert Fludd & for the content from the famous “theater of memory” of Giulio Camillo, with the result that the façade represented the sum total of human knowledge. Driven by clockwork mechanisms, large wooden wheels, artistically decorated by the best artists of Rome, slowly turned, reproducing the courses of the planets, the sun & the stars. Seven other wheels, equally delightfully decorated with emblems & allegorical figures, were superimposed, but set off from each other: as they turned, Prometheus appeared, then Mercury, Pasiphae, the Gorgons, Plato’s cave, the banquet the Ocean gave for the gods, the Sefiroth &, within those classes, a large number of symbols drawn from mythology, which allowed all branches of knowledge to be gradually encompassed.

  When Queen Christina, fascinated by this spectacle, enquired about its maker, Cardinal Barberini sang Kircher’s praises, telling her she would soon have the opportunity of meeting him, since a visit to the Roman College had long been planned for the next day. He added in passing, as if to make fun of the common people who kept commenting on these figures, that this plaster & wood encyclopedia had cost more than five hundred crowns. The paintings were by were Claude Gelée, known as Claude Lorraine, & Poussin; as for the practical details, they had taken sixty-six hundred large nails, & four boilers had been in operation uninterruptedly for two weeks to produce the 130 gallons of glue needed to assemble the various parts of the ephemeral facade.

  Christina’s admiration knew no bounds & she immediately sent for Kircher to give him a precious medallion that she gracefully detached from her bracelet.

  CANOA QUEBRADA: Drinking isn’t such a sin …

  Waking next to Aynoré’s body, ensconced in the hammock he rented in the lean- to at Dona Zefa’s, Moéma spared a thought for Thaïs. Scraps from her fling with Aynoré, as precise and embarrassing as pornographic pictures, exploded over an image of a sad, accusatory smile. Her forehead felt as if it were being squeezed by a ring of iron, her moist skin gave off a smell of sour wine and her mouth tasted of sawdust—all signs that her remorse was the product of last night’s binge. She just needed to put up with it for a couple of hours and she would be cleansed of this nebulous feeling of shame, which is nothing more than the postbooze horrors.

  Aynoré was sleeping like a log, a Gulliver trapped in the fine net of his tattoos. His naked, suntanned body inspired not so much a feeling of tenderness as of respect, a sort of esteem bordering on veneration. All she retained of the things he had said the previous evening was an impression of efflorescence, something like the slow-motion take-off of a parrot, the red and gold traces of a lost paradise.

  She suddenly heard a voice above her: “So you couldn’t resist him either?” Marlene’s pale face had an expression of slightly contemptuous surprise. “Don’t worry, I’ll keep silent as the grave. I just hope you haven’t switched over, that’s all.”

  “Drop it, will you,” Moéma replied stretching out, totally unconcerned about the fact that she was naked. “And you can tell who you want what you want, I’m past the age of secrets.” She pulled her tousled hair aside, like opening the curtains. “Is it late?”

  “Eleven o’clock, time to get up for a joint. They way you look, poor thing! The whole gang of us are off to the beach, are you coming?”

  “We’ll be there,” Aynoré said without opening his eyes.

  Seeing the quiver that voice sent across Moéma’s skin, Marlene raised his eyebrows in a jokey expression, “Well, well, old girl,” he muttered as he went off, “you haven’t seen the last of your troubles yet. Você vai espumar como siri na lata …”

  During the few moments Moéma stayed in the hammock, running her fingers over her lover’s hairless skin, Marlene’s innuendo had time to get its hooks into her. It was no use her telling herself the drag queen’s insinuations were only dictated by jealousy, she couldn’t recover the happiness she’d felt during the night. Added to the feeling of having betrayed Thaïs—it was already clear to her that giving herself to the Indian was not a passing fancy but a commitment with no way back, a deliberate and definitive farewell that she ought to sort out with her friend—were the doubts aroused by Marlene’s acid comments. His “either” had struck home. Given his appeal, Aynoré was bound to attract girls like flies … So what? The feelings that had thrown them into each other’s arms were unique and no one had the right, except out of spite, to say differently. Aynoré had promised to initiate her into all the things in us that modern society was doing its utmost to obliterate and she trusted him to keep his word. You couldn’t tame a wolf, nor was she attempting to do that, she would become a she-wolf herself, worthy of his way of being in the world, of the savageness he put into it.

  It sometimes happens that one feels the need to be all the more determined in justifying a dream when it begins to fade; Moéma clung onto this one, trying to secure it by a founding act, a sacrifice that would testify to its legitimacy. As she pondered this vague plan, an image came to mind that brought a victorious smile to her lips. She shook herself, suddenly released from her fears, and climbed carefully out of the hammock.

  When, a few minutes later, she gave Aynoré the comb and scissors she’d borrowed from Dona Zefa, the Indian made no difficulty about going along with her request. With the haughty aloofness that astounded Moéma, he started to cut her long hair in the fashion of the women of his tribe: having cut a horizontal fringe, which came down to her eyebrows, he continued along that line at the sides, leaving the full lengt
h of her hair over the back of her neck alone. He shaved her temples, to remove all trace of the former growth, and finished by clipping one of the blue-and-red feather earrings he sold in the streets to the lobe of each ear.

  “You’re lucky I’m not a Yanomami,” he said as he held a piece of broken mirror in front of her, “you’d have been seeing yourself shaved from your forehead right back to the middle of your skull.”

  Moéma didn’t try to recognize herself in the strange reflection he held in his fingers: with the sacrifice of her hair, her dream had finally emerged from limbo, she felt herself put right, inwardly modified after what she saw as an initiation ritual. Strengthened by this rebirth, she started to imitate Aynoré in his haughty bearing. Silent, with economy of movement—like a priestess of the olden days, she thought—she rolled a joint with a mysterious smile. And what she smoked that morning was not maconha but the sacred Caapi, the intercessor between the world of men and that of the gods …

  As they went down to the beach, in the dazzling midday brightness, Moéma felt beautiful and in a warlike mood, a killer of men, an eater of flesh, an Amazon. They stopped at Seu Juju’s hut to eat crabs.

  Thaïs had gone away toward the sea as soon as she saw their silhouettes appear over the top of the dunes.

  WHEN THEY REACHED Marlene’s little group, far along the beach, beyond the promontory shielding the nudists from prying eyes, Moéma would have been happy to continue, but Aynoré took off his shorts and sat down among them without even consulting her.

  “Deus do céu!” said Marlene, putting his hand over his mouth, “what have you done to your hair?”

  “If you don’t like it,” Moéma said, getting undressed unselfconsciously, “you’ve only to look the other way.” She looked daggers at one of the boys who was giggling unrestrainedly. “It’s my business, not yours, OK?”

  “Hey, stay cool,” Marlene said in conciliatory tones, “I was surprised, that’s all. You can shave your head, for all I care. But all the same … Turn around.”

  Moéma hesitated for a moment, then turned round, glowering.

  “It looks great! It suits you, it really does.”

  Aynoré had stretched out on the beach. He was lying there, eyes closed, unmoving. Slightly embarrassed, Moéma noticed the size of his penis: in a soft curve against his thigh, it was longer than those of Marlene and his pals. Proud to have established this, she lay down beside the Indian, fully aware that all the others were eyeing them. It was good to be consciously naked as the focus of all these looks. Stretched out like this beside each other, they must look like the primordial pair, and she wished she could split herself in two to be able to enjoy the sight. With a mental flick of the hand she brushed aside the image of her father that suddenly appeared above her, drawing on his cigarette as he shook his head with a woebegone expression. Her mother would perhaps have understood, perhaps not, but she would certainly not have simply watched them with that hangdog expression … Moéma moved her arm until it touched Aynoré’s and when his hand closed over hers, she felt happy, at peace with the world and herself.

  The sun was burning her skin in a way that was pleasant. By association of ideas, she remembered the story of the fires and the flood, the three founding catastrophes of the Mururucu myth, that Aynoré had told her before going to sleep, though her memory of the details was somewhat confused.

  Even the air was burning … That was how the few survivors of Hiroshima had put it, in those very words, without anyone learning the ultimate lesson of human folly from them; all at once she felt too hot to stay on the sand one second longer. She got up, announcing that she was going for a swim, shook off her dizziness and ran to the sea.

  After having played in the waves for a while, she lay down on her front at the edge of the sea. Facing the beach, her hands under her chin, she concentrated on the bubbles of foam sizzling on the back of her neck at regular intervals. Thirty yards away from her, Aynoré had joined the others at keeping the ball in the air with shouts and acrobatic dives. Far beyond them the short cliff bordering this part of the shore—a cliff of solidified sand, the sand that was put in layers in little bottles for the tourists—was like a rampart veined with gradations of pink.

  Roetgen … Moéma realized she hadn’t given a single thought to him since the moment, already distant, when she’d left the forro da Zefa. He must be somewhere out on the open sea and she couldn’t wait for him to get back to tell him how her life had been turned upside down in his absence. She resolved to be there to meet him when the jangadas came back the next day. Perhaps she could do a thesis on the mythology of the Mururucu or gather sufficient material before going to Amazonia. She definitely wouldn’t tell anyone of her decision, not even her parents. Later, perhaps, when she had children, a swarm of little half castes playing along the riverside … She saw herself in the pose of Iracema, motionless beside the river, her bow aimed at the shadow of an invisible fish, or prophesying beside a fire, her eyes haunted by visions. The female condition of Indian women? The evidence that proved a thousand times over that they were kept on the sidelines because of their “impurity.” The practise of “couvade,” the tragicomedy in which the Indian men, in their masculine pretension, went so far as to act out the sufferings of childbirth and, moaning in their hammocks, receive the congratulations of the whole tribe while the new mother, still unsteady on her feet, was tiring herself out cooking cakes for the guests. All these distortions, which usually modified her enthusiasm for the Indian tribes, had vanished into thin air, rather as if all her critical faculties had been disconnected. Her love—for the first time she gave that name to the euphoria she felt at the mere thought of Aynoré—would transcend all these obstacles; and, if necessary, they would bend the tradition a bit …

  At the roar of an engine she turned her head toward the promontory: driven at full speed along the very edge of the shore, a gold-colored beach buggy was visibly growing bigger as it sent huge sprays of water shooting up.

  WITH A GOOD wind behind it, the jangada had been bowling along toward the shore for two hours, comfortably riding the heavy ocean swell. Cutting up a huge turtle, which they had caught right at the end of their fishing, had delayed them, so that now the sun looked like a globule of red sitting straight ahead of them on the dark line of the coast. João gave his orders for landing: “You come beside me,” he said to Roetgen, without looking at him, “and don’t get off till I tell you. One false move and we’ll capsize.”

  Roetgen had understood the point of these orders; standing and symmetrically placed on either side of the trestle, which they were clinging onto, the four men had to concentrate right to the end on keeping the jangada balanced as it headed for the beach. A hundred yards from the shore, where the waves started to break in long, translucent rollers, João tensed as he clutched the steering oar. Features taut and eyes ceaselessly moving to check the trim of the boat and the hollow of the waves threatening to swamp the stern, he corrected its course with swift, precise touches on the helm. If it should get athwart the waves, or lose a little of its speed, the waves would roll them like any old log. Every time a breaker seemed about to catch them, João maneuvered so as to maintain the surf and the jangada would accelerate sufficiently to escape once more. Swept away uncontrollably by the final combers carrying it toward the shore, the vessel suddenly bumped the bottom, its headway carrying it, scrunching, up the beach. At João’s command, the four immediately leapt out and held the jangada against the pull of the ebb while other fishermen running to meet them placed log rollers under the prow and helped them push it out of reach of the waves.

  The two-wheeled collection cart, pulled by a mule, came to meet them. While João was arguing over the catch with Bolinha, the driver, Roetgen took a minute to catch his breath. He was exhausted, but with that mellow weariness that comes from the completion of a task that everything had suggested would be beyond his ability. His sailor’s pride was now joined by the sweeter sense of having been accepted by the fisherme
n as one of them, of belonging as of right to their brotherhood. It was at that moment that he saw Moéma … The first thing that outraged him was her new hair style, so ridiculously loaded with meaning, the second to see the Indian kiss her on the neck as they came toward him. That smug complacency of a pregnant woman, Thaïs nowhere to be seen … Moéma hadn’t even spoken to him and already Roetgen was ruminating on the sour secretions of his self-esteem.

  Without being insulting, he replied curtly to her questions with the slightly disdainful distance of someone who doesn’t really have the time to talk to idlers. Then, apologizing to her, he helped João and the others to carry the fish to the cart. When the time came to distribute their shares, he told Bolinha to take the one due to him to the fisherman he’d replaced and to see that he was credited with his usual amount with the cooperative.

  With a weary smile, João slapped him on the shoulder: they were going to drink a cachaça or two together, perhaps even three, assuming they didn’t collapse first. With a little wave to Moéma, the two men picked up their things and left, staggering with fatigue, against the light in the red of twilight.

  For a few seconds Moéma watched them go as they climbed the dune. Roetgen’s looks had made her feel ugly and she had to hold back the tears.

  If I’ve become addicted to drink,

  … the violeiro said, sitting on a beer crate, his voice husky, his guitar cracked. The mug of a Haitian sorcerer … the guy was falling apart at the seams …